Incredible, shrinking Obamacare

Obamacare is a fiasco. Why don’t the media acknowledge that? And it’s fair to ask: Why don’t they ridicule it? After all, in the Bush years, the press reran President George W. Bush in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner time and again, did they not? Perhaps Joe Biden at the signing ceremony saying into an open mic that this was a “big (blanking) deal” would suffice.

How do we know Obamacare is failing? Ironically, because those very same “reporters” are doing the opposite of the Bush years. They’re burying the story. They aren’t in denial. They know the truth. They’re just choosing to ignore it. They are pretending there are no broken promises about keeping your insurance plan, or keeping your doctor, or lowering your premium by $2,500 a year. They are pretending, like Ellen DeGeneres told the president, that “everyone” in America loves Obamacare.

Just how much coverage have they given to this, the most important domestic issue since Ronald Reagan’s economic recovery plan? A Media Research Center analysis of the three network evening news broadcasts in 2014 found only 12 full stories on three networks in almost three months. “NBC Nightly News” has broadcast one story on Obamacare in this calendar year. That was a piece on Jan. 1 marking the start of what fill-in anchor Lester Holt called “a new era in health care in this country.” Including that piece, “Nightly News” has only offered five minutes and five seconds of evening-news coverage of the health care law in 2014.

ABC’s “World News” wasn’t much better, offering only six minutes and 58 seconds on Obamacare in 2014. And the tone? On Jan. 2, ABC’s Jonathan Karl relayed the story of Maggie Fernandez, saying how “for her, the dawn of Obamacare means better health coverage, money saved, and a chance to make her first doctor’s appointment in nearly a year.”

The “CBS Evening News” was the least embarrassing program, yet it managed only 19 minutes and 17 seconds of coverage over almost three months.

Compare that to its coverage of that jet.

CBS was also the only network to locate a victim of Obamacare. On Feb. 8 — a lower-rated Saturday night newscast — CBS correspondent Carter Evans told viewers about a 4-year-old girl sent to Seattle Children’s Hospital by her family doctor, only to be told later that the hospital has been deemed “out of network” by the Obamacare policy.

One of the doctors said, “We’re seeing denials of care, disruptions in care. We’re seeing a great deal of confusion and, at times, anger and frustration on the part of these families who bought insurance thinking that their children were going to be covered, and they’ve, in fact, found that it’s a false promise.”

CBS also aired a Jan. 2 report by Sharyl Attkisson who revealed a study that found previously uninsured individuals actually used emergency rooms more once they enrolled in Medicaid and showed “no measurable improvement in physical health, such as blood pressure or cholesterol.” But CBS’s lack of interest in these stories led her to resign.

Unlike their appetite for Iraq polling, none of the networks dared to report the ongoing opposition of the American people to Obamacare in 2014, even when they were the ones doing the polling. In early March, NBC’s pollsters found 49 percent of adults opposed Obamacare versus only 35 percent who supported it. But “NBC Nightly News” would not even touch its own poll.

Last September, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calmly told Dr. Nancy Snyderman on “NBC Nightly News,” “I think success looks like at least 7 million people having signed up by the end of March 2014.” Now, Team Obama claims they have 5 million — if you flagrantly ignore whether the sign-ups have actually paid for their policy, which is the only way to “get covered.” And when you consider the 5 million who have lost their policy, you stand at zero.

The failure of Obamacare is a big (blanking) deal. As is the media cover-up.